AMERICAN HERETICS

A survey of extreme religious dissent in the American polity, from colonial times through the current age.

Copulsky, a scholar at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, explains that he uses the term heretics in his title “loosely and a bit playfully, against a background of religious pluralism and liberty, but also with serious intent—as a way of registering the fundamentally religious nature of their dissents and highlighting the irony that they did so while claiming to be upholding Christian orthodoxy.” The orthodoxy these dissidents have opposed is one represented by Tocqueville’s portrait in Democracy in America of multiple sects and creeds peacefully coexisting in a pluralist democracy, sects that in Europe had gone to war against each other for centuries. The ostensible reason for this harmony: the establishment clause of the First Amendment, the basis for the separation of church and state. Each chapter concerns a different strain of heresy, beginning with Anglicans scandalized by their fellow colonists’ rebellion against the Church of England and ending with the National Conservatives of our time who align themselves with illiberal “populism” in Hungary and around the world. The chronological approach enables Copulsky to make clear from the start the non-Christian origins of the nation’s founding documents and the fallacy of the latter-day “heretics” like Jerry Falwell who insisted on the contrary. He quotes his subjects generously, giving them plenty of room to make their often shocking cases. All are learned, well-versed in history, and some, like the pugilistic Catholic integralist L. Brent Bozell and extreme Christian reconstructionist R.J. Rushdoony, write charismatically and almost persuasively.

A chilling consideration of persistent mutations of American thought still threatening our pluralist democracy.